Random Pixels op-ed: Putney tells Cubans seeking asylum, 'Get in line!'

Channels 10's senior political reporter Michael Putney, ended Sunday's show with this rebuke of the outdated wet foot, dry foot policy that applies to Cuban nationals who are smuggled into this country.

Before we leave you this morning my personal perspective about the wet foot, dry foot policy for Cubans.

I think it's inconsistent, unfair and irrational.

This week we saw the latest example of it. A 20 year-old Cuban woman named Yenet Gispert Consuegra arrived here with 9 other Cubans, brought here by smugglers by boat. They dropped the immigrants ashore and then took Yenet to a Miami gas station where she called the police.

Yenet Gispert Consuegra

Obviously illegal immigrants from other countries don't call the cops when they arrive for fear they will be taken to Krome and deported,

But Cubans are different. All they've got to do is set foot on U.S. soil and they're in thanks to wet foot, dry foot and the Cuban Adjustment Act.

When Yenet talked to the police she said she'll stay with family in Tampa.

She didn't say a thing about fleeing political persecution in Cuba; so she is clearly an economic, not a political refugee and she's home free even though she's a part of a criminal act: human smuggling.

She's here for a better life ... I hope she gets it.

But there are people in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, throughout the world who would come here in a second for a better life if they could.

They can't because they don't have wet foot, dry foot.

Cubans shouldn't have it either.

It may have made sense once, but it has not for a long time.

If a Cuban wants to seek political asylum in the United States, fine. Let them apply like anyone else and then prove a well-founded fear of persecution for political or religious reasons.

If they can prove it, let them stay.

Otherwise, get in line like everyone else.